A fact about photography: we can look at people’s faces in photographs with an intensity and intimacy that in life we normally only reserve for extreme emotional states
ADAM GOPNIKThere are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
More Adam Gopnik Quotes
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Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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Of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
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Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.
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In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.
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You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.
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The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more.
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New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.
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I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.
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Americans also seem to believe that the monarchy is a kind of mediaeval hangover, encumbered by premodern notions of decorum
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Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
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The grace of capitalism is to make wants feel like hopes, so that material objects and stuff can feel like the possibility of something heroic and civic.
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There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.
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That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.
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Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.
ADAM GOPNIK